The converter extracts the text in reading layout and, separately, the font size of every line. The size used for most of the text counts as body text, and larger sizes are ranked into up to three heading levels. Images are not exported, and tables come out as lines of text rather than Markdown tables.

PDF is built for printing, so its text is stored as positioned lines with no idea of what a heading or a list is. Copying from a viewer gives you broken lines and loses the structure. Markdown keeps structure as plain text, which is why wikis, notes apps and code repositories use it. This converter rebuilds that structure from clues inside the PDF.

The main clue is type size. Most documents use one size for body text and larger sizes for titles and section heads, and the converter ranks those sizes into heading levels. Documents that mark headings only with bold at body size come out as paragraphs, and multi-column layouts may interleave their columns. Read the file through and adjust headings by hand where needed.

Scanned PDFs have no text to extract, so the job stops with a message. Run them through OCR PDF first, then convert the searchable copy. For plain text without Markdown marks, use PDF to Text; for an editable document with its layout, PDF to Word. Going the other way, Markdown to PDF turns a .md file into a formatted PDF.

PDF to Markdown runs on our servers. Your PDFs are converted automatically with no one reading them, and both the PDFs and the Markdown files are deleted from our servers within 2 hours. No account is needed and there is no limit on the number of conversions.